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MythDora — MythTV 0.2 In a Box
peterdaly writes "MythDora 3 is the first MythTV 'in-a-box' style distribution to include MythTV 0.20. Based on Fedora Core 5, MythDora 3 is designed to format your hard drive then install everything needed for a fully functional MythTV System. Here is a walkthrough of the entire MythDora installation process, including screenshots and a screencast."
How, other than being based on Fedora, is this any different from KnoppMyth? It runs as a LiveCD and will then (if you want it to) install itself onto your hard drive, doing all the requisite steps.
I'm not panning MythDora, but it just doesn't seem totally unique, unless I'm missing some critical thing about it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Enseñemos a nuestros cabritos a utilizar Linux con Dora!
Typo: Myth is at .20 not 2.0
Why not just install Fedora and then "yum install mythtv"? Why has installation of Myth always been non-trivial? Now it's to the point where someone would rather format and install the entire OS...
If you're willing to install a linux distribution in your living room you should give Pluto a try. It incorporates myth and many more from media to home automation and is a free as in beer Debian based Linux.
Do I care if... -> Do I care if you care? :)
:^)
Normal does it, a retard does it and talks about it.
If you said it, you did it.
Waiting till I'm done doing something and saying something retarded does nothing...
What..? -> What did you say it was?
So you can do something different with my conroe, see ya people, gonna go see
if the kkk, gangsta, daemon people want anything...
Isn't the general mythtv installation - it's the driver installation for all your hardware (most specifically, Lirc). The only way I really see a tool like this being groundbreaking is if they manage to stick a great GUI on top of Lirc setup (which is quite a bit more difficult than a graduate quantum chemistry course). Lirc aside, mythtv setup is fairly trivial these days. And excuse me for wanting Knoppix (a distribution time-tested at dynamically picking up new hardware) as the foundation rather than Fedora for a system that is very dependent on picking up all the necessary hardware.
/etc and my kernel/.config the second I finally got all the driver crap working ;)
That being said, I put it on top of a gentoo system, and backed up my
Kudos to the Slashdot editors that totally screwed up the version... And for arguments sake, I hope this is not MythTV 0.20, I hope it's 0.20-fixes. Since the Myth devs never put out a release that's worth anything all of us distro packagers have to constantly keep on top of all the patches that are necessary to actually make MythTV function.
Nothing to see here... This is nothing newer then KnoppMyth but in a Fedora shell.
The first image that came to mind on reading the title was a MythTV box dedicated to recording episodes of "Dora the Explorer." And then my brain let out a primal scream, because if there is one thing I don't need in my house, it's more Dora.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map.....
I'M THE MAP!
*proceeds to play Russian roulette with a fully loaded revolver*
I'm running mythtv on fc6 after simply adding atrpms to the repo list and doing a yum install mythtv*
Nothing against MythDora, but after getting burned by Fedora far too many times I don't want to go near anything Fedora-based. Basing off of Ubuntu would rock.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
This is the eternal police force of things do things or not. you don't do anything!
act accordingly!
on the meds?
Does anyone know if MythDora supports a DirectFB install? I can't seem to find any conclusive information on whether Myth 0.2 even supports this anymore.
MTIA
soap
which is quite a bit more difficult than a graduate quantum chemistry course
Huh? I had both a serial port IR emitter and transmitter working easily (heck, the blaster worked on the first try). Configuration of the receiver was a matter of running irrecord and following the instructions, and then tweaking the lirc key mappings until I was happy with them.
Honestly, I have no idea why people have so much trouble getting lirc working.
People have so much trouble because it is horribly documented, and there are tons of things to go wrong in the driver process, from the kernel-module lever to the userland software. The user-side software also has horrible error returns, so you can't figure out at what point it's breaking (since the kernel module rarely reports any errors when modprobe'ing it). Even the gentoo how-to pages which are normally excellent proved insufficient.
Lirc is a pain-in-the-ass unless you bought hardware specifically to go along with the how-to or tutorials you were using to install it, because the generic documentation is insufficient for specific cases.
KnoppMyth will run a frontend system as a LiveCD. Obviously, for the backend part, it would have to be installed, but KnoppMyth does have LiveCD functionality.
Hey, why is this still based on FC5? We're at FC6 now! The main issue I have with these Fedora-derived distros is that they never even come close to keeping up with upstream.
It's easy to set up. "yum install mythtv-suite" installs -all- the myth packages including mythweb and such. Pretty minimal configuration involved. I'd say that starting with a blank box I'd just built, it took me about 4 hours to install Fedora and myth both from scratch.
The problem is that my desktop has no legacy interfaces. In particular, the DVD drive is SATA, and the keyboard is USB. Knoppmyth and Mythdora cannot currently handle installing from a SATA optical drive. Knoppmyth kindly popped me out to a shell when it couldn't find the installation source directory, but the drivers for the USB keyboard apparently hadn't been loaded, so I couldn't type anything anyhow.
I'm currently installing Myth 0.20 over Fedora Core 6 with the help of the MythTV on Fedora HOWTO by Jarod Wilson. It's been very helpful, but I still find myself spending a lot of time tweaking things to get everything working correctly. MythTV installation is just plain hard.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I think when he was talking about a "USB remote" earlier in his comment, he meant an RF-based wireless remote. The Harmony 890 is one like this. It has a base station which is a RF receiver and IR transmitter, so you can use the remote anywhere in a 100' radius and the base station will relay the remote's commands to the appropriate device via IR.
So it's basically: [Remote] -> RF -> [Base Station] -> IR -> [Device]
I've never used the Harmony series, but they also have USB interfaces, for programming. Maybe there are even some where you can plug the receiver directly into a compatible device using USB, and skip the IR step (not sure if they work like that though).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's great that there are projects out there to setup the software and all but I could use some help in picking the right hardware. I don't want a noisy box rattling away while I'm using MythTV.
Can someone give a few links that allow someone to gather the hardware that will look good, work well and be totally silent?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
. . . and considering that Fedora 5 comes with 2.6.16 (at best) it's not likely to fare any better on current-generation hardware. I'd still have to download the vanilla kernel, track down any vendor-specific optimizations, merge those in if the process isn't too time-consuming, then figure out which combination of kernel modules/firmware/tuner settings work with each rev of each card. Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC. I then ordered an uber-cheap-but-easy-to-configure MSI TV@nywhere, and I had that card up and running in literally five minutes, compared to 3-4 hours of trying various firmware and tuner setting combinations with the Hauppage. Not only that, the MSI does hardware MPEG2 encoding, hardware-assisted MPEG4, plus NO appreciable delay in the display. Not only that, the MSI works with standard TV apps like xawtv and kdetv, whereas the Hauppauge works ONLY with Myth.
Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.
I like Myth, really, and plan to put time into getting it to work perfectly, but it's hard to put aside an entire day to devote to setting up a TV/PVR application.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The problem with using the Vesa or other OSS drivers is that they don't support proprietary features of some NVidia cards, like accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. If you're trying to use an older set of hardware for your STB (like an older Celeron, or something else that can be easily passively cooled), and have a TV tuner card that records to MPEG-2 (like the WinTV PVR 150/350 series) this is a major issue. Offloading the decompression to the GPU saves a lot of CPU cycles.
If there are OSS drivers that support these features, then I'll agree with you that there's no reason to screw around with the NVidia binary ones, but every piece of documentation I've read says that you are better off using the Nvidia drivers with an Nvidia card, in order to get good video performance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There was no flamebait at all in there, I answered all of the problems he suggested exist (which don't), and then proposed he must have some kind of agenda to suggest they do. I'm guessing it's an idiot who also couldn't figure out how to install a fairly simple-to-install application, and instead decided to waste their money and buy a proprietary piece of crap to produce crappy DRM'ed files.
I have tried getting my tv cards working on a currently installed FC4 but had no real luck, and didn't fancy ruining a perfectly functioning media server just to experiment. The cards definitely work BTW (dvb_bt8xx Zarlink MT352). I have a spare HD so I tried installing a live cd version of PCLinuxOS which has been remastered to concentrate on MythTV. Unfortunately, the damn installer kept complaining that I needed to reboot to make the changes to fstab before I could format the drive. After every reboot the drive was still not set up, and the partitions had been rearranged. When run as a live cd the mythbackend can't write to the dbase because it's on a read only mount point ! So I gave up on that and decided to follow the instructions here. I went for FC5 because I already had it on dvd. But the initial yum update was 700 MB and so it's still running. I haven't got much further yet, so I may investigate this new distro.
???
I just went to the driver homepage and selected the option consistent with my kernel version.
More than anything else, it looks a little Mickey Mouse to have different releases for different versions of the 2.6 kernel but it was by no means difficult.
While it will be nice once the ivtv takes it's place with the classic bttv drivers in the kernel and in the distros, the sad fact remains that you can't follow simple instructions. If not for TV dinners and canned foods, you would probably starve.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just out of curiosity, does that four hours include getting IR support working? From what I hear, getting a working remote control can be a real killer.
If you did, four hours has to be something like a record. You must have really lucked out in terms of hardware compatibility. Any chance you'd want to list your configuration?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A new KnoppMyth is just around the corner! It is smaller, faster and offers more features. Just be a little more patience folks. The elves are finishing up the work and Santa is tuning the sledge.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
ummm?
Install Fedora
su
yum install mythtv
done!
Thanks for all the hard work, cesman.
I don't want a big, noisy computer next to my TV. I've priced out the components for making low noise small form factor rigs, but it seems that a Mac Mini is cheaper. Could it be used?
Oh man, just hearing that damned map in my head made me shiver. He always sounded like he was trapped, pleading for his life - that somehow if the viewer made it to the end the animators would stop torturing him. It was just sad.
I am so glad my daughter is out of that phase. Of course, now she watches Handy Manny - which I'm amazed they actually produced. A show about a hispanic handy man? A short jewish shop owner with a cat and a combover? (the cat has a combover, too, btw). And I think there's just a little too much sexual tension between Manny and Kelly (the chick who owns the hardware store).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The version number in the topic is STILL wrong... first it was 2.0 and we all commented... now it's 0.2. MythTV 0.2 is several years old. They're on MythTV 0.20. Are you guys publish an article about Verizon being terrible with numbers?
You're welcome.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
With your help, we just installed a new Linux operating system!
***cue mariachi band music***
I'd still prefer two (or more) discrete CPUs. Several years ago I did some research and the multi-CPU boards seem to allow for greater total bandwidth between CPU, disk and memory. Well, in my price range anyway.
Perhaps modern motherboards are better.
Blar.
what is this obsession with version numbers. FYI we went from 1.3 straight to 2.0. I consider current 2.6 to actually be a 2.0. the mapping is as follows
2.0 -> 1.4
2.2 -> 1.6
2.4 -> 1.8
2.6 -> 2.0
to get to 3.0 we have to have 5 more even numbered releases.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And like many before me, what is so special about MythDora? If I want to do a MythTV install I'll use the iMedia distro (SFF / small install footprint) or KnoppMyth.
As I walk through the valley of death I fear no one, for I am the meanest sonova bitch in the valley!
My biggest problem with LIRC is that lircd doesn't support multiple kernel drivers. I have 3 different LIRC devices on my myth system, and I have to run 2 different lircd instances. Everytime I think I have things set so that the modules load in a predictable order an update changes something and everything will break. Also, one of my devices is the I2C port on my PVR-250 card, and there is some weird dependency with module loading order and the ivtv module that is not handled correctly automatically. Which leaves me trying to understand and override the hotplug scripts, which makes me want to kill small animals.
I am not sure who I should blame here, lirc, fedora, hotplug, or atrpms, but it is a major annoyance. Enough so that I would consider Myth unusable by most people. Presumably it works better if you only have a single IR device for send and receive, and it is USB or serial.
My install took about 15 mins to do on FC6.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Yeah, multiple LIRC devices is definitely more difficult than it should be. In my case, I built a split BE/FE system, and so each box only needs to control a single LIRC device. Later, when I expand my BE with multiple capture cards, I'll need more than one blaster, and I'm sure things'll get a little more hairy.
I use TED to download the TV shows I miss, I wish there was a plugin for MythTV to have shows downloaded and added to my MythTV Box.
... is anyone can make their own. I just finished one based on Ubuntu Edgy. It's more hardware and configuration specific, though -- it installs MythTV 0.20 as a combined system, the pcHDTV-5500 drivers, the nvidia driver, and LIRC. It also pre-configures MythTV with the pcHDTV-5500 card.
Well, open source linux PVRs. Closed source Proprietary Linux PVRs like Tivo will be available for a subscription fee.
What we need is to hire some lobbyists to get the US government to mandate that the standard be opened up. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with Standard Def and over the air HD.
No Dish, DirectTV, or cable High Def.
I'd throw a couple hundred $'s in.
Go for the gusto..
http://plutohome.com/
The bottom line is if Linux folks (and make no mistake, I am one myself) keep deluding themselves about what's "easy", we're not going to gain acceptance for a long time. This process is not easy. It may be "easier" than taking a standard Linux installation and installing MythTV on it, but it's not easy.
That is all.
Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC
What are you going on about? The 150 *captures*, it doesn't display, so I don't know what this "500ms or so delay on the display" that you're talking about is. Nor do I understand how said delay could "[render] the cable guide totally worthless".
Well, open source linux PVRs.
Well, open source HD-capable PVRs. You'll always be able to pull an SD feed from an external tuner.
Have you ever actually set up a full MythTV system that is both a frontend and backend? Because if you have, you would reallize that yumming mythtv will only get you about half way. This command will put the mythtv software on your computer, but it will not configure your remote, it will not set up the mysql database, and it will not configure the software itself to recognize your cable service, picture settings, display type, etc. MythTv is by far the most difficult project I have ever undertaken in Linux. Plus, don't forget about all of the preparation before you even run that little yum command you speak of. There is lots of research to do and decisions to make. What kind of hardware? What Linux distro? How should you partition your hard drive, and what filesystems to use? Is this a frontend, a backend, or both?
For those out there considering a MythTV install, don't be misled. MythTV is a huge undertaking for even an advanced Linux user. But don't let me discourage you either. For those who like a good challenge and like to tinker, and like to create something none of your friends and neighbors have, it is a lot of fun and you will learn a ton. My suggestion is to do your homework in advance. Find out what hardware configuration will give you the smoothest install. Building your own computer from scratch where you have hand picked EVERY component will be the path of least resistance. The more oddball parts involved, the more difficult it will be.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Sounds like you got lucky. I've set up Myth about 4 times so far, and my record for getting the remote to work is 4 hours. Keep in mind this is the same model of remote each time as well.
Problems varied, and all but one can be blamed on Ubuntu making things more difficult, but I would never charactize Lirc setup as easy.
However, now that I've torn it down and rebuilt it about a dozen times per myth installation, I feel pretty comfortable using it.
On a related note, this guy is offering a bounty up to $225 for a Linux program that implements configuration syncing for the Harmony 880.
Having started with Knoppmyth, and then moved briefly to Mythdora, I settled in on a manual compile of Myth 0.19 on Suse 10.1. It was this configuration that worked best for me - because I had invested in 2 PCHDTV HD-5500 tuners. I could not get them working in Myth 0.20 at all, and finally made them work in 0.19. The feature set between the two is minimal, with 0.20 being a lot of fixes and optimizations, so there's not a lot of love lost.
Myth is not an easy thing for even the experienced admin to make work. Because of the dependencies and the hardware involvement, this is more than just installing an application and having it work. For people new to the Myth infrastructure, it's actually rather nice to have a live CD install everything that's necessary. For 90% of the folks wanting to try it, they're going to have a dedicated PC for it anyway. Of course, if you want to just throw in a tuner card and try it that way, you can compile it too.
If you're a Suse person, you can check out a HOWTO I put together for 10.1 and PCHDTV cards here. It covers all the stuff one has to do to make a Myth box work with HD under Suse 10.1. While there are RPMs available for Myth 0.20 on Suse 10.1, the package doesn't support HD, which is what my project was specifically designed to be.
If you do plan on doing HD - be vigilant in your hardware selection! HD playback takes a considerable amount of computing horsepower. I really recommend getting an nVidia 5200 card for playback - not only are they super cheap, and sometimes fanless (read: noiseless), but they also support the nVidia XvMC playback driver, which accelerates MPEG2 streams, offloading decoding from your processor. It also does a fine job at Bob2X deinterlacing, required for watchable HD.
He probably means the buffering. The PVR-*50 and 500s don't just pop what they're capturing onto the screen in Myth in real time. They actually do about a 2 second buffer before showing something on the screen. Whether that's the drivers for linux or Myth I don't know.
I do remember seeing something a while ago on Windows MCE where they were showing off how they had worked around the buffering and were able to just go to Live TV without any pausing. Hopefully it's a matter of time before Myth gets that functionality.
He probably means the buffering. The PVR-*50 and 500s don't just pop what they're capturing onto the screen in Myth in real time. They actually do about a 2 second buffer before showing something on the screen. Whether that's the drivers for linux or Myth I don't know.
That has nothing to do with the Hauppauge cards and everything to do with Myth and, in fact, ffmpeg (which apparently chokes if you give it a partial frame, and so Myth buffers conservatively in order to ensure this doesn't happen). The same would occur on any capture card, AFAIK.
And besides, how on earth does that make the guide unusable? If anything, it makes the guide *necessary* (as channel surfing is basically a no-go).
I do remember seeing something a while ago on Windows MCE where they were showing off how they had worked around the buffering and were able to just go to Live TV without any pausing. Hopefully it's a matter of time before Myth gets that functionality.
Not likely, at least not in the near future. This could be done if Myth sent the captured stream straight to the FE, while at the same time writing it to disk, but the issue is considered low-priority (and I happen to agree... the delay isn't long enough that I give a damn, and is really only an issue if you're one of those suckers that habitually channel surfs, rather than using the guide like a sane human being).
BTW, if anyone is thinking about it, please don't bring this issue up on the mailing list. It's a very long standing issue that tends to ignite expansive flamewars...
Out of curiosity, did you order this card.
It looks good but I can't tell from the MSI site if it support OTA high-def or just unencrypted cable high-def.
Gee. So much for linux being better. This is WORSE than windows.
On OLDER chipsets, OLDER videocards, sure. But I wanted to run a Core 2 Duo, not a Pentium II or Pentium III.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
With the Hauppauge, I get the exact same behavior in Windows.
Also, the video quality for the uber-cheap MSI is vastly superior. Fewer compression artifacts at even LOWER bitrates, no interlacing artifacts with the MSI, the only thing the MSI does not do better than the Hauppauge is that the MSI does not decode MTS.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
No, that's going to be my next card. After reading reviews about how well the cheap tuners worked in comparison to the Hauppauge without any delay, I ordered the TV@nywhere which is an NTSC card costing between $30 and $40.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I found it to be incredibly easy to setup, and there are some pretty good guides ready for anyone with the interest:
http://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV/
Wake up.
Wake me when MythTV starts supporting Postgres.
Using: .20 from universe
-ubuntu 6.10
-myth
-leadtek DTV1000 http://www.rectron.com.au/Leadtek_dtv1000.htm
It worked using the default kernel included in ubuntu and took me 2 hours total, including installing the OS.
Steps:
1. install ubuntu
2. apt-get install dvb-utils
3. use scan (with the canberra, ACT, Australia pre-tune) to create a channels.conf
4. use tzap to verify signal strength for each channel
5. apt-get install mysql
6. apt-get install mythtv-backend mythtv
7. set a password for user mythtv and log in as him with fast-user switching
8. go to tvguide.org.au, register, set up channels to download, set up tv_guide_au script (will vary depending on your country)
9. as mythtv, run mythtv-setup
10. Tell it to import my channels.conf (it can scan, but "scan" does a better job in my experience)
11. run mythfilldatabase
12. enjoy!
Step 12 was really 3 steps:
A. Run mythtv, see framedrops
B. Install nvidia drivers (apt-get install nvidia-binary or something like that) and reboot
C. Enjoy!
With the Hauppauge, I get the exact same behavior in Windows.
Again, I ask, who cares about a friggin' 500ms delay?? And how does this make the EPG unusable?
It makes the digital cable provider's menu unusable, or at least downright annoying. click, waitwaitwaitsomemore, see the next page, then click, waitwaitwaitsomemore, see the next page, etc.
If using Myth's guide, it's not a problem. Where it really becomes a problem is using the cable provider's on demand movies.
Good grief, some people really are dense -- either that or they simply like to argue for argument's sake.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I"m not certain who is it aimed that... The next release has been tested on a Core 2 Duo. KnoppMyth development is driven by me. How can you expect one person to support the latest hardware when:
Hardware support may not be in the kernel (I use vanilla with only 3 patches).
I may not have the hardware to test.
I'm one person building a distro (Yes, I have helpers. But ultimately, it is up to me if KnoppMyth is to improve.) working in his spare time.
If you want to see something added to KnoppMyth, the you need to contact and work with me.
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
And are willing to. Tivo is for those that can't (>ilk).
:-)
No more complaining about Myth being hard to setup. No-one makes you do it.
Quack, quack.
Good grief, some people really are dense -- either that or they simply like to argue for argument's sake.
No, the problem is that you made an apparently (and actually) nonsensical complaint about MythTV and the Hauppauge cards, only to admit later that you're doing something frankly silly (using the cable box EPG with a system clearly not designed to be used that way).
But you are right... some people really are dense.
If not out there already, I may try and create a VMWare appliance using this install DVD...seems like a worthy candidate.
It's silly? Tell me how you propose to order video on demand offerings?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Well, one obvious option is to pass the svideo to your capture card and pass the coax to your TV. Switch inputs, do what you need to do, then switch back.
Actally, yeah... I've set up a mythbox a few times. In fact, I have one running in my living room right now.
Are you kidding, it is NOT a HUGE undertaking for ADVANCED linux users, especially with a package management system. It may be a little challenging for joe blow windows user, but anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in linux should be comfortable installing myth in less than an hour!
Myth itself took all of 2 minutes to install, as described above.
MySQL is another yum install
As long as you use standard hardware (i.e. hauppauge PVR150/250, soundblaster, nvidia video, etc.), the hardware is all pretty much automatically detected (at least in fedora). I used an ATI TV wonder framegrabber before, and it worked equally well (had to tweak channel frequencies in the MySQL database to offset the tuner's bias and colors lined up correctly).
Mythtvsetup is GUI based. (Even with this distro, you have to run it at some point!)
Zap2it listing setup is WEB BASED (Even with this distro, you have to run it at some point!)
The issues that took the most time to sort out were
- hardware overlay on TVout using ATI's drivers (after spending a weekend on it, I finally decided it was impossible, and got an Nvidia card. Had that working fully with hardware 3d and overalys in 5 minutes)
- Lirc, but only because I was using a PVR150 with a universal remote. Took a few tries and some trial and error to get the remote configuration file correct. After that, I spent another half hour or so futzing with button aliases to make the control work seamlessly in myth and VLC.
Save for the Lirc and ATI card overlays, (which took 99.9999% of the time of the install), myth itself took 15 minutes to install and configure.
Do you have to know linux basics? Yes
Does knowing how MySQL, alsa, ivtv, lirc, x11, etc. work help? Yes
Do you NEED to know MySQL, alsa, ivtv, lirc, x11, etc.? Probably not
Do you have to read the documentation? Yes, at least a little
Are you going to run into some kind of problem along the way? Probably
Will it work flawlessly using this new Fedora/Myth distribution? Probably not
In fact, my personal experience with "appliance" CD distributions (such as KnoppMyth) is that if something does not work right out of the box, it is a TOTAL pain in the ass to fix. Rarely do you have a compiler, kernel sources, etc. Rarely are theses distros using the latest packages out there, so you often run into dependency problems when trying to fix something.
There's a nice prebuilt system that incorporates MythTV for $500-700... http://www.tvease.net./